Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The Perfect Rejection Letter?

I recently discovered The Rejectionist, a very amusing blog with even funnier comments from The Rejectionists' many talented readers. Recently, he held a contest for people to write the best form rejection letter. There is quite a list of very clever letters but here is the overall winner. I was duly impressed. Hop over and read the others.

This is by the very talented Brian Buckley! Congrats Mr. Buckley!!

Dear Sir or Madam:
Please don't be offended. Your query's horrendous.
We can't understand why you'd bother to send us
a missive so deeply in need of an edit
we wanted to vomit as soon as we read it.
Its hook was insipid, its grammar revolting,
its font microscopic, its manner insulting,
its lies unconvincing, its structure confusing,
its efforts at comedy less than amusing.
We think that on average the writing is better
in comments on YouTube than inside your letter.
"No matter," we said to ourselves after retching,
"The novel itself may be perfectly fetching.
"On reading your pages we promptly were greeted
with something a wallaby might have excreted:
a plot so moronic, a premise so weary,
and characters so unrelentingly dreary,
descriptions so lifeless, a setting so boring
that only our nausea kept us from snoring.
In short: if your book was a vaccine for cancer,
its margins inscribed with Life's Ultimate Answer,
and all other novels on Earth were rejected,
we're still pretty sure we would not have selected
this terrible, awful, impossibly hated,
unspeakably horrible thing you've created.
But thanks for submitting!
We hope you'll consider
alternative ways to get published (like Twitter)!

5 comments:

Elspeth Futcher said...

I saw this yesterday and bookmarked it. Isn't it absolutely brilliant?

Elspeth

Anonymous said...

How did they get hold of my last rejection letter? LOL.

Lauri said...

Elspeth- I thought it sounded like Dr. Seuss. Fantastic.

Selma- I do believe there are publishers I've sent to who would have loved to have sent this to me.

Gutsy Living said...

This should have been read during the La Jolla Writers conference I just attended where we had several sessions on how not to query.

Elizabeth Bradley said...

Very funny stuff. Sometimes, not often, I do feel sorry for agents. Some of the queries they get are beyond bizarre.